1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a sintered silicon carbide which can be used as a semi-insulator or insulator and suitable for a semiconductor device and the like, a silicon carbide powder suitable for production of this sintered silicon carbide, and a method of producing a silicon carbide powder which can produce this silicon carbide powder efficiently.
2. Description of the Related Art
Silicon carbide show larger band gap and excellent in dielectric breakdown property, heat resistance, radiation resistance and the like as compared with silicon. Therefore, silicon carbide powders have been noticed as electronic device materials for portable high output semiconductors and the like, or as optical device materials owing to excellent optical properties, and sintered bodies thereof have been applied to electronic devices and the like.
As the method of producing the above-mentioned silicon carbide powder, there are a plurality of suggestions, however, a method of producing a silicon carbide powder having a content of impurity elements (elements belonging to group I to group XVII elements in the periodic table according to 1989, IUPAC, inorganic chemical nomenclature method, revision, and having an atomic number of 3 or more (excepting a carbon atom, nitrogen atom, oxygen atom and silicon atom)) of 1.0 ppm or less is not known well.
On the other hand, a sintered silicon carbide obtained by using a silicon carbide powder containing significant amount of a nitrogen atom and the like which are not included in the above-mentioned impurity elements can be utilized as an n-type semiconductor, and for designing a semiconductor, it is further required that the sintered silicon carbide forms a p-n junction together with a p-type semiconductor. However, a sintered silicon carbide which can be utilized as the above-mentioned p-type semiconductor is needed to have a small content of a nitrogen atom and the like which are not included in the above-mentioned impurity elements, and such a sintered silicon carbide is required to be produced by using a silicon carbide powder having a small content of a nitrogen atom and the like which are not included in the above-mentioned impurity elements, however, such as silicon carbide powder and a method of producing the same are not known under current conditions.